Miami Building Collapse Could Profoundly Change Engineering | Hacker News Reader

Miami Building Collapse Could Profoundly Change Engineering

scientificamerican.com

28 pointspseudolus29 comments

Is it just me or is the headline exaggerating a bit? The article doesn't seem to give any hint that "engineering" will change "profoundly", but rather checking that buildings are built to code, inspecting their current state, making extrapolations about their future. None of this is extraordinary, especially if somebody is interested in keeping a building intact and willing to pay for it.

Sounds more like a political change about allocating money for all of this and/or forcing someone to pay for it.

It is part of the engineer's job to anticipate age and maintenance (or lack of maintenance) when they're designing their structures. And it is the engineer's moral responsibility to uphold public safety above all other concerns. We may see changes to the code to prevent another catastrophic failure like this one.

Are such changes a rare occasion? I had naively expected this cycle (accident, analysis, changes to code or law, quiet period, then another accident with a less obvious cause) to be a tragic but necessary engineering routine. I'm referring to that "profound change" that, to me, sounded like there would be a change to that cycle itself, not just updates to the building code.

I could be wrong, but I'm guessing that the designers and contractors that built those buildings assumed that regularly scheduled inspections and maintenance would happen. How do you design a building that can withstand 40 years of neglect? Now, how do you do it and have it be affordable to build?

Perhaps not, but that is the state of many buildings of this size in the US. I have seen many condo buildings that on the surface appear in much worse repair than the one in Miami that collapsed. If it is not a design, engineering, or construction flaw, and no unlikely external factor is found, a huge number of buildings need immediate attention. And from an engineer’s perspective the answer might be to over engineer buildings because no one is following proper building upkeep.

It doesn't help much to over engineer. Suppose we design the buildings to last 200 years. After 200 years, they start collapsing at the same rate as the rate of construction. If we built a new one every day, then after 200 years we'd have a new collapse every day.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Deacon%27s_Masterpiece

Best thing I’ve read today, and the first time I’d seen it too. Thanks!

I like to remind people that these buildings were built in the 80s, when Miami drug lords began laundering the piles of money they were sitting on. I doubt they cared about building code and I doubt the paid-off authorities did, either.

A city of chaos, corruption, and stupid people.

This is a silly meme. Why would a drug lord want the attention that comes from a building collapsing. They don't need to save nickels with bad concrete work. Drug lords would build better buildings than average, because they can afford it.

This wasn't primarily an issue of neglect. An inspection in 2018 found basic mistakes made (likely negligently) in construction.

The building was too slow to fix them, but the blame is more on the builders than the owners who couldn't easily pay the enormous costs to repair.

I feel like the body of the article doesn't fit the headline. Given the flat deck of the swimming pool area, pictures of exposed/corroded rebar in the basement, and so on, I think what it will change is how building codes and maintenance are enforced, if anything. For instance we might see states impose controls to ensure private owner associations (like condo boards) can't ignore life-threatening problems. We may also see some changes regarding where buildings can be built or what degree of over-engineering is needed, given that there may be environmental peculiarities here like a settling coastline area (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/27/us/miami-building-investi...). But as yet, it isn't clear that there is going to be some kind of fundamental new learning in construction engineering that will alter how we build buildings.

The real problem is that it seems a small collapse of the open area next to the pool over a parking level propagated to a large portion of the structure in seconds.

I suspect slabs coming off pillars took away horizontal support from pillars on the "good" side of the slab. Then those pillars came away from adjacent slabs.

There's a number of warehouse rack collapses where a single failure takes down all of them. I suspect a similar mechanism.

Cascading failure isn't just for computer networks anymore!

Off-topic question, but I read that some people survived.

How can one survive such a collapse?

Does being on the upper floors or lower floors increase odds of survival?

How many of the survivors were located in a collapsed section? I assumed, maybe incorrectly, that the vast majority of the survivors were rescued from still standing portions of the structure.

What about the survivor who got taken to a hospital and then died?

I suppose if you were in the standing portion (and didn't fall down), I‘m not sure how to get injured badly?

Nobody who was in the collapsed part survived. The people on the bottom got crushed and the people on top fell 200 feet.

Horrible. Thanks.

Falling 200feet isn't necessary fatal if you are riding the floor down and the structure is collapsing 10 feet at a time as the accordion collapses.

Some collapsed structures stack very thoroughly and leave no room for air pockets or people pockets. Looking at the short stack of collapsed floors in the images I've seen, it's really unlikely this time that there is anyone in there alive.

uh, no, unless you count "responsible maintainence" as "engineering" which it isn't.

In Europe we have buildings that were built 100 years ago. There are no issues with these buildings and I bet these can last for additional 100 years. It is insane that we have 40 years buildings collapsing.

In this context, we're talking about buildings of 10 stories or more.

Such 100+ year old skyscrapers can be found in Chicago and New York. But the first skyscraper in Europe (the "Boerentoren") wasn't completed until 1931.

Had to google that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boerentoren: “At the time of construction it was the second tallest building in Europe by roof height (after Telefónica Building).”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telefónica_Building: “The Telefónica Building, in Spanish Edificio Telefónica, is a skyscraper in Madrid, Spain”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_skyscrapers#Emergence_of...: “The first skyscraper in Europe, Witte Huis, was built in Rotterdam in 1898”

⇒ Wikipedia doesn’t think it’s the first skyscraper in Europe.

That last building (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witte_Huis) is a whopping (not, nowadays) 43 meters high, but does have a steel frame, and that (alongside height) is one of the main criteria to define “skyscraper”.

They all look nice, but the Boerentoren has the most skyscrapery look to me.

This collapsed building was also on the Florida coast. Storms, salt in the air, heat, humidity, sinking ground....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_structural_failures_an...

Loosely collected data of What building collapsed Where. (includes bridges & towers)

In Europe, the buildings that are 100 years old didn't collapse 60 years ago. This is a perspicacious observation.

I bet a lot of European buildings that were built 100 years ago had some issues when they were 20 years old, though.

The oldest building in my city (capital of one of the largest states in the US) was constructed in 1728, and the oldest street originated in the mid-1600s and is still paved with cobblestones.

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